Summary

Linguistic and discourse analytic studies of food-related communication demonstrate how people construct identities and (re)create and contest ideologies that focus on food but extend well beyond it to issues of socioeconomic class, culture, gender, and privilege. Scholarship in this area considers how people engage in food-related communication across contexts, including in mealtime conversations, on restaurant menus and food packaging, in recipes, on social media, and as represented on infotainment food television. Analyzing the details of human interaction and texts also illuminates the role of specific linguistic and other communicative strategies—such as use of adjectives and metaphors—in constituting the food-related discourse that helps constitute human experience.